Invierno en junio.

Uno no adivinaría que es verano por el tiempo que hace, pero sí lo es. Hoy hacía unos 64 grados con cielos nublados y a veces caía gotitas de lluvia.

Y así me gusta.

No me malentiendas; prefiero que haga un poco más calor, con cielos azules y una brisa, pero solo cuando yo no tengo que trabajar. Como la mayoría de los seattltecos, cuando hace buen tiempo me es imposible trabajar en la oficina. Cuando sale el sol por allí, los empleados de todos niveles solemos decir cualquiera mentira para que sus jefes nos deje escapar; la hora de las citas tan fastidiosamente escritas en el calendario viene y va sin que nadie se de cuenta. Y no hay que dar pretextos. Cuando hace sol en Seattle, todos nos cambiamos de idea a favor de pasar tiempo afuera.

Entonces, como yo tengo que presentarme a la oficina, mejor que no haga buenísimo tiempo. Yo he podido cumplir muchísimos deberes al trabajo, así que no tendré que pensar en esos asuntos cuando me vaya para estudiar en China.

Lo triste de este estación es las tantas despedidas que tenemos que hacer... sí, a los pocos alumnos que nos caen bien, pero sobretodo a los colegas que se van a otro parte. Al MJo le despedimos en una fiestita en la casa de KJo. Juntaron los miembros de la academia, todos con una comida all-American que el pobre no va a poder conseguir en Shanghai. Yo traje unos deviled eggs.

Me quedé dos horas, y entonces tuve que escapar para encontrar los colegas en Ototo Sushi para la despedida de Bde. Yo pedí el plato de sashimi y una sopa miso. Toda era de buena calidad, menos el servicio del mesero. No tan mal como en Vancouver, pero me sentía invisible. Como éramos tantos en la mesa, la casa nos cobró una propina obligatoria del 18%. Un poco exagerado.

Mañana tengo que presentarme tempranito para hacer la oración de la mañana en el altavoz. Después una hora tranquila, y entonces voy a dar el examen por Bde. Y después de eso, se van los alumnos, y los profesores se reunen para la misa. Entonces, el almuerzo, y entonces el parque para fumar el cigarillo anual. Y en este momento, quiero que haga sol. Pero no antes.

The Night Before Finals.

This has got to be the grooviest new way to find a restaurant in Seattle. (Thanks, Seattlest)
It's a clickable map mashed-up with Google maps and links to restaurant reviews. So now you can search by neighborhood. Groovy, no?

American Idol's infamous Seattle auditions are tonight. I usually don't watch the show (too much like my work), but I might tonight, just to see if I recognize anyone.

I do know a couple of talented kids who went to audition; one who was called back.

The principal played chicken with the weather this morning... and won. We started this morning at 7:45, when all of Seattle's public schools, in addition to the private high schools, had a two hour late start. I was annoyed when I woke up that I had to go in so early, but the roads were bare and wet and traffic was downright light. I'll have to go in again tomorrow to do morning prayer. Sigh.

The good news is that it's no longer freezing, so my central heating is back up and running. My heater has a little pipe that drips water through a pipe that sticks out outside the wall of the house. When the temperature drops below freezing, the water in the pipe freezes up, and then the heater quits. I'm trying to think of a way to remedy the situation so that I can have heat, you know, when it's cold.

"Yet another snowday" and "Gay people, oh no!"

I missed the snow tree phone call this morning; I was in the bathroom. But the snow is coming down, and classes are cancelled! I'm probably the last one who isn't put off by it; at this point we've had so many snow days, even the students are getting irritated.

Last night Robert Mak was fishing for controversy.... you know how they do that, they find something nobody has noticed and then ask people about it, hoping that they could find somebody bigot to say something outragous, so they can break a news story that they manufactured.... Well, yesterday they found an Ikea ad in the newspaper with two men in the kitchen, which implied that they were GAY! GAY GAY GAY!

Quick, Robert Mak, go find a homophobe on the street! I'll get the camera... We'll call it "news!"

Anyway, I find it remarkable only because one of the people they found was my gay-friendly cowsin E. Click here for the video.
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The snow is supposed to fall until around 8pm today, and then finally we'll thaw. I think I'll make myself some eggs.

Dear White Guy...

Dear White Guy,

Why haven't you been beaten you to death yet?

There are dozens of ways this video is wrong.

Thanks a lot, Angry Asian Man.

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Today I had school. Dang it! If they don't call a snow day tomorrow, I might eat my shoe. Tomorrow is our Dr. King assembly, and I'm in charge of morning prayer, but I've still got my fingers crossed for a big deep freeze.

Today I had a meeting from 4 to 7, and snack was Ezell's. I teased one of my students for looking exactly like the guy on freecreditreport.com, which I won't link to because it's a scam. It's a scam in that it's not free at all. Incidentally, the youtube comments seem to show that the actor, "I'm thiiiiinking of a number between 450 and 850...." that the guy is a math teacher named Mark Swanson.

At 7pm after the meeting, it was snowing hard, so I offered to drive B home, rather than let her take the bus for 5 hours. We finally made it to SeaTac Mall, where I dropped her off, since the rest of the way was dangerous hills. Her husband came and got her in a minivan with chains. That was around 9pm, and it took me another hour to get back home.

For dinner I made myself two pancakes, some brown n' serve sausages, and a fried egg. That's right, for dinner, so what?

And now I'm tired and I want to go to bed.

Another Snowday? and No Comment Video

Don't you want one of these? I'd like one, but I'll wait until the third or fourth generation of it.

I've decided I want to do this this summer. Now I gotta pay the funding game.

The day started at around 57 degrees. I actually slept in; I jumped out of bed when I realized it was daylight already. Whoops. We had a short day scheduled; a faculty meeting, a luncheon, and an afternoon dedicated to office work. Around 2 pm the wind started kicking up and it sounded like the ocean. People started leaving, especially if they had biked to work, or if they wanted to get across the bridges.

When I got home, my parking spot was filled with construction debris. My condo association's renovation has finally started, and work has started on my building. They've torn up the roof at the other end of the building, and they've excavated around the leak in my basement. I've got an industrial strength dehumidifier going 24 hours in my den, the furniture is moved, and the carpet is pulled back to dry.

I am pretty sure my parking spot has been swept clean, and the roof and excavation have been wrapped in plastic. The wind and rain storm has passed, and now it's relatively calm. The news says it will freeze and snow tonight, so I'm pretty sure classes will be cancelled tomorrow. The big question is how many snow days we'll have. Other teachers and many students, especially the seniors, are wary of missing another day of school, but me, I'm confident that I can adapt. I face the day off work without fear.

And now it's time for a nap.



I don't want to comment on this video, except to tell you that it's about chicken anuses.

Yah, yah....

I haven't felt like blogging in a while; really the only reason I'm blogging now is out of some kind of journaling guilt. That's good enough.

The stomach thing was three days of... needing immodium... followed by three days of gagging. Never puking, but gagging. My parents have been in town since Christmas, and all mama wants to do is cook and knit. Now it is a great, great thing when mama stays and wants to cook, but when you've got some kind of GI virus, it's not so great. I was hungry for most of the time, but the gagging kept me from eating a lot. And, unfortunately, my house was permeated with a chicken/onion/ginger soup smell for a few days, which my nose now associates with the gagging feeling. I don't know if I'll ever eat chicken soup again. Don't take it personal, mama!

Today around noon it started raining this slushy slush that wasn't hail, but it wasn't snow either. It was some kind of clumpy slush. The weird thing is that it came down for hours and hours.

I came home after work and hung out for a while, and then went to V and M's wedding rehearsal, followed by the rehearsal dinner at Ponti. The hors d'oeuvres were little chicken satays, grilled shrimp with a spicey pepper sauce, little button mushrooms stuffed with gorgonzola, and some crab-stuffed spring rolls with that same spicy sauce.

The dinner menu was a salad, a choice of salmon, seared ahi, or beef tenderloin, and then a choice of chocolate or lemon tart.

Yesterday, mama and I went to 老四川。 The waitress complimented my Mandarin! We ordered sauteed peavines, ants on a log 蚂蚁上树，and eggplant with pork, which I think is called 家常茄子。

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Just now my mama turned to me and said,

When we were little, we used to get a chicken, and lift up its... it's
tail, so you can see its.... it's anus... And then we would blow like this
"fooo fooo"... and then the tumbong would go like this: (puckering her lips
rhythmically, wuh-wuh-wuh).... and that's what I think of Donald Trump.

I swear, she just turned to me and said that.

I think that's the end of the blog for today, folks.

Wind Day Report

Woke up this morning at 6:30, still no power. One new message on the cell phone: No school today. Sweet.

I texted H to see what her situation was; her power stayed on. I got bored by myself without electricity, so I went to Ballard market and bought eggs, sausage patties, pita, oj. Went to H's place, she cooked breakfast. Yum!

Caught up on email, etc. Found out that Simbang Gabi Mass was canceled, or at best postponed. In either case, the church is closed for business tonight. Boo! Come on, it's the first night of Hanukkah... you know, the miracle of lights? Hmph. We may be going to someone's house, since a lot the food is ready to go, seems a shame to waste it...

Took a nap on H's couch. Woke up around 11, putzed around, made my way home.

Got home at noon; the clocks were blinking 2:30, so I'm assuming power came back on at 10:30 am. Stopped at Safeway for some chicken, chocolate, and emergency candles. The best kind of emergency candles, I think, are the Mexican novena candles, because they are cheap, bright, long lasting, and encased in a jar for safety. They used to be 99 cents, but today they were $1.49.

For lunch we had cous cous with peas, chicken tenderloins with green peppers stewed in some senegalaise peanut sauce in my freezer from the Soirée Sénégalaise. It was delicious, of course, with pita. I also brought over the cheese plate from my fridge, and some mini cheesecake squares from my freezer.

Then what happened? Surfed the net for a while, watched some Futurama, blogged. Blogging.

Tonight; no Simbang Gabi. Gotta stop by work to pick up my Christmas loot (a jar of jam, a pouch of salmon chowder concentrate, various other gifts-for-teacher). Faculty bowling is at 8:55, which is the way we market 9:00 pm, nowadays. I will miss Battlestar Galactica, but I will download it tomorrow and watch it on my laptop.

May the force be with you, or whatever.

Big Fat Rainstorm, Calm, Big Fat Windstorm.

After school, during my meeting today it was raining so hard, it was amazing. People's basements flooded all over the place.

There was a calm, and I went to A's for book club. I hadn't read the book, but I was bringing the wine, so I didn't want to flake. I was worried, though, when H's text message said that water was coming into her office.


So I left book club early to come check on my place. I made the mistake of taking the Alaskan Way Viaduct home, and got stuck in stadium traffic. I don't want to be too hard on the off-duty cops who direct traffic, but they totally stopped 1st Avenue S traffic for 30 minutes to let out the Seahawks fans. I was actually stuck on the Viaduct offramp, and so traffic stopped behind me, all the way onto the Viaduct itself. It seems to me that Viaduct traffic should take precidence over parking lot traffic.


When I got to the intersection, the traffic cops had a good two mintues of nobody moving. They let traffic go one way, and weren't paying attention and didn't realize there was nobody coming. So I waited at the line for two minutes. Then finally they waved in the oncoming traffic.... and never waved us on! I waited, as did the guy in the next lane, but it looked like both traffic cops on different sides of the intersection were chatting with other people, and had forgotten to wave our direction. Screw that. So I went, and everyone followed me.


It took me an hour to get home from Ballard.



Well, the eye of the storm is passing now; it's not raining so much at this moment, but the wind is shaking the house. And it's loud. Hood Canal and 520 bridges are closed; I-90 will close when windspeeds hit 65mph. I've never seen this kind of wind before. Schools are closing all over the place, but so far not in the city. Power is winking, but so far hasn't blacked out.


Remember the leak in the basement that they never fixed? Well, it's back. That lawyer woman who told me to hold tight until the lawsuit was done, and then wait until the HOA construction was done, I'm sure she's very smug in her smug little house. I hope she wakes up covered in ants. The carpet is soaked in that corner.


The good news? My new couch has arrived. It's a bummer that there's now a wet spot in the corner of that room. Grrr!

High Winds

The SeaTac Airport people are a bunch of grinches. No trees, no menorah, no nothing, because it would have killed them to honor other religions. Gross.

Today, as I drove home from work, there was a rainstorm; it was like people were throwing buckets of water. After that was a big windstorm, and the power went out in the CD, so all intersections were four way stops.

I bought some cheese and a baguette; that might be my dinner. I'm also boiling a can of condensed milk. I'll tell you how that goes.

"It's not that bad. "

The local anchors are teasing the weather wonk about wearing shorts in the cold weather. "It's not that bad," says the weather wonk.

In grad school, we invented a mythology, and one of the characters was "that white guy" who always wore shorts no matter how cold it was outside. Invariably "that white guy" would respond, "actually, it's not that bad."

It's now a little before seven, and my school's late start still hasn't been listed on tv. I'm sure the website hasn't been corrected either.

I cranked up the heat, to see if my heater would respond. It has. Why did it punish me for the two coldest days of the year? I'll have to turn it down again when I go to work.

This commercial cracks me up.

Late Start; You Gotta Be Kidding

So at 5:45 am I got a phone call from the faculty snow tree. Grr, I should have let it go to voicemail. School is two hours late today. I dragged my sorry ass out of bed, so I could find the number of the next person on the snow tree. I put on all my clothes in anticipation of my freezing house.

Well, I opened the door, and the bathroom wasn't freezing, the hallway wasn't freezing, I went upstairs and it wasn't freezing! I looked at the thermostat: 66 degrees. I looked at another thermometer: 66 degrees. What the heck is going on? I spend two days at home, and it's an icy deep freeze; but they day I have to go to work it miraculously comes back to life? Three days ago I was unhappy with 66 degrees, too cold. But after two days of 50 degrees, 66 seems downright balmy.

Man, whatever.

So my school starts two hours late this morning, but you wouldn't know it from watching the news. It's 6:20 now; a half hour after my snow tree call, but my school's delay is still not showing up on tv news.

The school's website is modified to show today's special late start schedule, but it's listed wrong, showing block 1, block 2, block 3, and block 4. Whoops. It should say blocks 3, 5, 7, 1. Which shows that whoever changed the website doesn't understand the class schedule.

I promised my students a quiz today; I'll go in at 8 to write it. Right now I'm going back to sleep.

Snow Day!

Well yesterday was a normal school day, and we all felt cheated, just cheated that we had to be at school at 7:45. The roads were fine, of course.

Last night I was grading papers that were bad to terrible in quality, so I put in a DVD to take the edge off the dispair. When my movie was over, local news was already reporting school closures. Ha ha, not my school of course, I didn't get official word until twenty minutes to six this morning, when the faculty snowtree was activated.

So the State Patrol is asking the population to stay home. The forecast doesn't show the high temp rising above the freezing point until Thursday, possibly, so tomorrow it might still be frozen.

Local news has only rolled out a few special graphics; I haven't yet seen theme music. I'm sure they're working on it for this evening. Winter Blast! November Snow! They're showing a lot of people who've either abandoned their cars, or spent the night in a parking lot. A couple of sad cases show some dudes with their faces still painted from the Seahawks game.

So I'm so excited about a day off of work. I've graded everything I have to grade here at home (there's more to grade on my desk at work...) so today is going to be all about cleaning my house, putting up my Christmas tree, and making an apple crisp. I'm a block from a supermarket, a starbucks, a blockbuster, a taco bus, and a neighborhood diner, so I'm gonna be just fine.

Right now, the plan is to go back to sleep; then I'll think about breakfast.

Pineapple Express

Well, folks, it has been raining HARD here, today but mostly yesterday. Yes, yes, it's raining hard even by Seattle standards. There are flood alerts all over the place, and in the rural areas, there are houses and roads being washed away.

I don't have Seasonal Affective Disorder. I'm from here. I like the rain.

I think I do get extra dramatic when the rainy season starts in earnest. So far, I've contacted a few of my friends from college and grad school who I've almost totally lost touch with, just to reconnect.

I have a side ache. It's too high to be appendicitis... it actually feels like gas. But it's been there since midnight last night, when I was trying to sleep.

There was a death in the community yesterday; today we pulled together a Mass. There's another Mass on Thursday, for Veterans' Day. I don't want to sing "America the Beautiful."

My ballot is sitting here next to me, I have to go drop it off. I will stop by the store on the way home pick up some tomato sauce, tortilla chips, maybe some sour cream. I'm gonna try to bring my lunch tomorrow. Peanut butter and jelly? Or maybe some left over chili?

Aujourd'hui les collegues m'ont critiqué que j'avais le portable éteint. A mon avis, éteindre le portable est l'avantage d'en avoir, quand même. Je m'en fou de ça, surtout parce que l'un d'eux qui m'a critiqué est un de ces gens qui a peur d'avoir un portable. Il y avait des tas des fois que on avais besoin de se communiquer avec lui, mais il a peur....

Il a pas le droit de m'en critiqué. Je crois qu'il a peur que tout le monde lui appelle, mais la solution est très simple, faut éteindre le portable, et voilà, ça y est.

Halloween?

I don't like dressing up for any reason. Not for weddings, funerals, parties, Halloween... no reason. The students ask me why I don't dress for "spirt week" or "decades day" (dude, for me, every day is 'decades day.' Specifically, the 90s).

So I don't like dressing up.

But I do like hats!

So today I went to Sears on First Ave ostensibly to get new pants. I didn't even look at pants, but I did look at a futon, and the fall home furnishings reminded me that it's time for another fondue party.

And then I walked across the street to the military surplus store, and bought three hats: a Greek fisherman's hat, a chef's hat, and a drab cap with a red star. So I figure I can either be a sea captain, a chef, or a communist for Halloween. I will probably be all three throughout the day... but to be honest, putting on the hats will most likely be the furthest extent of my "dressing up."

The weather, by the way, has been downright cinematic. Foggy morning, hard rain at noon, the sun and blue skys while I was still at lunch, overcast in the afternoon with blustery wind, swirling leaves, and skies full of small, flocking birds. Now, golden sunset.

I want pie. Or ice cream or something.

Lazy; might be a problem.

Yesterday: went to Auntie E Uncle T's place for a wedding party; the actual wedding was last month in the Bay Area. It was fun, we ate a lot, enjoyed the big house (star trek kitchen, deck to die for, tiki pool room). Played mahjong.

Here's some of the food: cheesey dip, artichoke dip, salmon dip, prawns and snowpeas in garlic sauce, strip steak, kalbi, lumpia shanghai, veggie pork lumpia, pansit canton, salad (in a stand alone salad bowl at the corner of the room) three whole rock fish.... leche flan with berries, ube cake, frozen mango slices layered with grahm crackers and marshmallow sauce.... A certain city council member was there; when my uncles make a show of giving their seats at the table to them, I got up as well to avoid him.

Uncle L and Auntie V were funny, reminiscing about Santo Tomas. Auntie V said, "When we were kids, we didn't have computer, we didn't have a videogame. We played Rubberband! We played Can!"

Can is played by throwing your tsinelas (flip flops) at a can; at some point, someone became "it" and got chased all over the place. "Rubberband" was some variation of marbles or petanque, only with rubber bands. The girls also had a hackey sack game. I told my sister that if she does ethnic or cultural studies, she could document these games for a paper. She was skeptical.

I got a drunk dial from Y, calling from a bar in Manhattan. He was disappointed by Montreal--too much English, but he was impressed by their clean chinatown. He's staying at M's in Manhattan, and encouraged me to go visit.

I feel lazy today. It might become a problem.

No More Anonymous Comments

Hey readers! .... all three of you!

I am disabling anonymous comments because of some cheap shots taken by an anonymous commenter on a post that no one has read in years.

Basically, has a beef against Dr. Mary Lou Ridinger of Jades SA of Antigua, Guatemala. Is the beef legitimate? Who knows. Maybe! But the commenter posted anonymously, and rather than accusing her of anything, the anony-mouse insinuated that Dr. Ridinger was hiding information, and that her product was junk. What a coward. This is the internet, man. If you've got something to say, then say it. "Dr. R is a crook because of X, Y, and Z." It's a question of cojones. Especially if you're gonna be anonymous; if your position is so weak that all you can muster is an anynomous insinuation, then maybe you should ask your mommy to give you a pillow, so you can lie down and cry into your pillow.

So for the moment you all (all three of you) will have to get blogger IDs if you want to leave a comment. What if ass-nonymous just gets a bogus ID? Well, I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.

_______________

Today there was a crazy freak rainstorm, with hard, crazy rain and wind. More wind, and ten minutes later it was sunshine and blue skyes. More wind, and the ground was dry.

I finally went to the secret Korean restaurant for mool naeng myun. It was a converted highway Denny's just off the freeway. So it wasn't much of a secret. But when I went in to the (very nice) dining room, there were only two other customers, both Korean. It's a family establishment, and the Mom brought me a nice salad before my mool naeng myun hit the table, with six panchan. It was good! With shaved ice! But they forgot to put in the meat.

Afterwards, I discovered Pal-do Korean Supermarket and bought two packs of ice cream novelties. One is a sweet coffee-and-creme push up, and I don't know why I have to go to a Korean supermarket to get such a nice dessert. The other ice cream novelty is like a dove bar. Yum!

Later, I met S and company for happy hour drinks and tapas at Peso's. I had a mojito. We sat there and yapped in Spanish for hours, as beautiful people came and went. L's friend P theorized that the waitresses were hired for their looks, since they didn't have a lot of chops as waitresses. In fact, he went as far as to suggest that they were exotic dancers. P is a bartender himself, at a pretty prestigious martini bar for old people and stressed out financial advisors who come to him for their martini lunch of shame.

Came home, ate some potato salad from Pal-do, practiced my guitar, .... reset my blog to disallow anonymous comments. And now it's time for bed.

Another anonymous commenter called this blog a scatterbrained vanity website, which is not so far off the mark. It's my journal, and I am the thematic thread. So what? I don't write for a wide audience, although a wide audience is certainly welcome to read. But please do remember, kiddies, you don't have to read.

You love to. Admit it!